The Free Webgame Round-Up

Self-aware triangles, the thought police, real-time chess – reality is falling apart at the seams in our regular webgame roundup, which this week is brought to you by [OUR GLORIOUS LEADER]. Click on for rebellious isosceles, stacks of minigames, a randomly generated roguey adventure and a revitalised board game classic (not Kerplunk). Enjoy!

Flatland: Fallen Angle by SeeThrough Studios

A fun noir adventure – inspired by Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland – that does for triangles what Thomas Was Alone did for our four-sided friends. You're an isosceles on the lam in the city of, um, Polygonometropolis, a dystopia patrolled by fascistic red triangles, who keep its citizens (grey triangles) oppressed. As you run, bash and dissect (ouch) your way through the city, you awaken the desire to fight back in the grey triangles, an act which turns them a lovely shade of blue. You, however, are just there for revenge, as made clear by the hardboiled narration.

An Epic Minimal Adventure by monsterkillu

More minigame than game, An Epic Minimal Adventure (also known, to keep us on our toes, as A Minimalistic Epic Adventure) shows what can be done with just user interface elements – not to mention a fair bit of creativity. It's a little like A Dark Room or Candy Box, only not as all-encompassing, and with an infuriating pixel hunt towards the end. Still worth a look though – I particularly like the lockpicking exercise.

A lovely sorta-roguelike – things change around each time you play – that puts you in the role of a hiker in a strange wood, with gems (good) and death (bad) and oddness (odd) scattered all over the place. It's a Fighting Fantasy book, essentially, only randomised and with lots of effective illustrations. As with that series you can easily cheat to revert death, if you don't feel like starting the whole thing again. You will, however, restart anyway, to see what other outlandish or atmospheric scenes await. (Via Free Indie Games )

1984 by
Gideon Rimmer and Ron Minis

A short, powerful interactive story based on Orwell's 1984. As IndieGames note, it's a series of scenes with no choice about how to proceed, but that's actually pretty fitting given the subject matter. Wonderful, dark, exquisitely told stuff, with a fantastic soundtrack.

CHESS by Sven
Anders

Oh my. Sven Anders' CHESS takes regular boring turn-based chess and turns it into an RTS (fittingly, it was made for the 7-day RTS compo). It's not quite as chaotic as you might expect, thanks to a small but beautiful concession: the addition of cooldowns to each of your chessy units. CHESS is still in beta, and it won't truly come alive until multiplayer is (hopefully) added, but I love the element of panic it introduces to what is typically a ponderously slow game. (Via IndieGames )